


Heart in Darkness

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Angst, Community: brains_in_a_jar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-01
Updated: 2007-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-07 01:04:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morden hasn't looked at the center of a Shadow vessel in a long time, and perhaps it's because he knows what he'll find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart in Darkness

Inside the ship, they didn't need to keep such a tight rein on him. He could feel the difference, almost taste it in the back of his throat. It was copper-sharp like blood when the endorphin high drained away, when for a moment he despaired of the _mission,_ of the _necessity,_ of the _purpose._

That moment always passed, but he still stumbled when he stepped inside the black mottled corridors of the ship. For just that moment, it was like dying. Like being back on Z'Ha'dum with Sheridan, staring down into the abyss, and Nietzche-like only staring into himself.

Then he could take a deep breath of cool, dry air and remember that he didn't need to be drugged to know that what his associates were doing was right and necessary.

Morden scratched at the back of his neck and looked around. One ship was very much like another, but they each had their own personalities, remnants from the crewmembers of the Icarus married to the ship's processors. He hadn't been in this specific one before, but everything felt somehow familiar. As though he'd been there before, or seen it in his mind's eye.

The wall was dark and somehow soft under his fingers, like living tissue. There wasn't any thread to mark his way as he traced his way down into the center of the ship, but he knew he wouldn't have any trouble retracing the labyrinthine passages. His associates would come find him if he mis-stepped, or if they reached their destination and he was missing. In the meantime...

Where had he felt like this? The familiarity of someone else's space, like the corridors of another mind?

The central hold of the ship was small. He'd only been down to one before, to watch when they put her into her ship. Because he'd had to watch. The ship hadn't looked like this, then. But when he stepped inside and saw the ship's brain who had once been a human being, he understood.

She was seated, upright, naked, her lower abdomen and upper thighs covered in the black skin of the ship; her head was tilted back onto a headrest, the implants standing out in sharp relief on her spacer-pale skin. Her hair had grown, in the past few months, spilling down across her shoulders in stringy webs of tangled flax. Her expression was blank.

He finally started breathing again. "Oh, Sheridan..."

She didn't respond. Hesitantly, he stepped forward, knelt next to her. She looked up and away, the black probes at the corners of her eyes framing her vision.

He took her hand. Her skin was soft, faintly warm. Her fingers lay limp and unresponsive, even when he pressed her hand between both of his.

"Sheridan," he whispered.

She breathed, evenly, with the thrum of the ship's engines, nothing more.

"Anna," he said, and nearly broke his voice on it. "I..."

And suddenly it was all there, the fear and pain and doubt he'd been trying to forget since Z'Ha'dum, that he'd asked them to dull so that he could concentrate on the work, the work, the damn important work that required them to take people like Anna and put them into ships like these, and somehow, they assured him, this was going to be made all right.

But he couldn't see how this was ever going to be made all right.

He dropped his head so he wouldn't have to look into her eyes, rested his forehead on the skin of her thigh, like a supplicant. "God, I'm sorry," he whispered. "I wish this hadn't happened to you."

Quiet. The thrum of the engines, the susurrus of breath. And then, gently, the fingers of her other hand, softly on his head, the sensation making him jerk back in surprise.

_Morden?_

He swallowed against a feeling like sand in his throat. "A... Anna? Sheridan?"

_I am the machine._

"I... I know. Sheridan, I'm sorry."

Her fingers curved around the back of his head, gently stroked the hair at the back of his neck. _Why are you sorry?_

He took a deep breath. "You're... you're not..." another breath, like he was up at twenty-nine thousand feet, out of oxygen and staring into white-out. "Are you all right?"

_I am the machine._

Her other hand was still pressed between his. He squeezed it tightly. "Tell me it's all right. Tell me it's worth it."

After a long moment, the corners of her mouth curved upwards, the ghost of a human memory of a smile. _It's wonderful._

He watched her breathe for another minute, but she said nothing else. Gently, he let go of her hand, and stood, her other hand sliding across his shoulder and coming to rest on her thigh again, neutral.

Seized by impulse, he stepped closer and brushed away her hair, for just a moment, just to look at her again.

Long after he had gone, long after the lights had gone once again dim, Anna raised her hand to once-human lips, to feel a trace of warmth.


End file.
